Merrimack's 'Tranced' could use a little loosening up

Being the smartest person in the room doesn't always work to one's advantage.

David Brooks Andrews

Being the smartest person in the room doesn't always work to one's advantage.

Al Gore found that out while running for president of the United States. It's also true of playwrights, unless they can disguise the fact. Like good hosts at a dinner party, they're better off being fairly invisible, letting their characters and audiences appear smarter, more interesting and more in control than themselves.

While "Tranced" runs at Merrimack Repertory Theatre through March 8, the playwright, Bob Clyman, will be the smartest person in the theater, even if he's represented merely by his script. Not only does he have nine plays under his belt - including the very compelling "Secret Order," produced a couple of seasons ago by MRT - but he's also a clinical psychologist who often works with criminals and testifies at trials and appeals. I wouldn't suggest trying to go up against him.

The upside of his intelligence is that it makes "Tranced" a very smart play with the four characters delivering extremely taut lines as if they were slinging darts at each other. It requires very careful listening. To be sure, there are a lot worse things than an intelligent play that requires us to listen closely and rise to its level of intelligence.

As for the downside, we'll get to that.

At the heart of the play is a young African woman (Azmera) who's originally from the fictional African nation of Guyamba, where a major dam project is under way in an effort to bolster the country's economy. But it threatens to displace large numbers of tribal people.

The play is set in two modern offices in an industrialized country, where Azmera visits Philip, a hypnotherapist or trancing psychologist, to help her with her anger and the trouble she's having concentrating while preparing for her engineering exams. In a deeply tranced state, Azmera reveals troubling events that she can't remember when she's no long under the trance.

Clyman's primary interest is complex ethical issues, and he raises these by having Philip share the case with Beth, a journalist who covers African affairs. Suddenly ethical questions arise involving a clinical psychologist's responsibility to his patient and to society at large and the trustworthiness of memories that can be recalled only under a trance.

The fourth character, Logan, is a political director of African affairs who constantly bumps up against Beth and her journalistic plans.

The dialogue is very crisp, almost as if it's written for an extremely sophisticated television series rather than for a play that tries to capture the way people actually talk to each other. It's filled with factual information or narrative about events that take place off stage. This makes for a very heady evening that requires intense listening, but for factual details far more than for emotional nuances of the characters. The latter kind of listening is what makes theater, at its best, an incredibly rich experience. It feels as if this material might work better as a short story than as a play.

The downside of Clyman's intelligence is that it tends to delegate us to sitting back and being impressed by his dialogue and play rather than involving us and our imaginations more in the creative process. You know he's definitely too much in control when he pulls the rug out from under us without any warning.

Director Kyle Fabel was on to something when he noted that the play is a kind of genre piece but perhaps a genre that Clyman himself has created. The problem is, the genre has its flaws.

Fabel would have done better to work against the grain of the script more and to encourage his actors to reveal more of their emotions. Mark Zeisler as Philip certainly captures the intensity and directness of a clinical psychologist, or the caricature of one, but he delivers every line with the same cold, curt tone, so we're left wanting to feel more of a human being with real emotions underneath the lines. As a result, his performance becomes too contained and monochromatic. It may be Zeisler's way of dealing with a script that's overly dense and wordy.

Zainab Jah as Azmera is a beautiful, engaging actress, but she has some of the same problems though her feelings show themselves much more fully as she shares her memories and as the play resolves itself.

Kimber Riddle as the journalist Beth gives the most emotionally rounded performance of the cast. She's a very welcome presence.

The character Logan is so superficial in his attraction to Beth and in his handling of the looming political crisis that he seems more like a television character than a real human being. Maybe it's due partly to the writing and partly to the way David Adkins chooses to play him. In either case, the character's not very sympathetic.

Campbell Baird has designed two elegant contemporary office spaces that merge with each other and are separated by use of lights rather than walls. His use of African masks is wonderfully effective and haunting.

"Tranced" doesn't make one want to give up on Clyman, by any means. One just hopes that the next play of his that MRT produces is a little more like his "Secret Order" and a little less like "Tranced."